Super Spellers. Making learning to spell Super FUN

Aim

Super Spellers is an exciting, fun and engaging web platform to support children ages 5 - 11 develop their basic spelling skills.

Over the past two years, Stacey Philips, my business partner, and I have been developing a fun and hands-on spelling game which combines gamification with learning to spell. Both Stacey and I are young mothers with children in primary education and we have struggled to improve their spelling results with the traditional look, cover, write method our schools suggest we use. 

After extensive research into what resources are currently available online for our children, we discovered a gap in the market for a spelling game that would actively encourage them to want to learn their spellings. We then embarked on a journey in a bid to plug the gap.

We investigated recent statistics within teaching spellings in primary education and found that almost 25% of primary school students did not meet the national minimum standard for spelling, punctuation & grammar.  Having said that, the introduction of compulsory spelling tests for all key Stage 2 pupils in England is expected to improve literacy standards. 

With clear evidence to prove a palpable need for a new and exciting way to engage children to learn and remember their weekly spelling we created Super Spellers. Students are given a unique hero name and avatar they can clearly identify with, then first train to learn their spellings in the Training Zone, before progressing on to the Mission Zone where their spelling retention will be put to the test. 

Students will be rewarded virtually by winning super coins for correctly spelt words and power badges to help them build stronger heroes. Leader boards for both individual year groups and the total school will encourage further gameplay.  

While the fun element is key, Super Spellers is also highly educational, resulting in the words learned then becoming embedded. Importantly, not only is Super Spellers simple and straightforward for children to both understand and use, but it is also super simple for teachers to set up and input their spellings for the term ahead. Teachers can also review individual student's gameplay results and set spellings according to their ability. 

We have been trialing the game at Bonneygrove Primary school in Cheshunt and have received fantastic feedback from the teachers and students as follows:

Miss Gursoy- English Lead, Year 6 Teacher - “We have been using Super Spellers for 3 weeks and today we had our spelling test. It was the first time the whole class got 9/10 and a third of the class got 10/10 correct. The students love the game.”

Jack Lythgoe- Year 6 Student - “I have dyslexia and have never got more than a few spellings correct in my tests. I have been playing Super Spellers with the dyslexia font turned on and today in my test I got all my spelling correct.”

Stacey and I are both super passionate in our quest to produce a pioneering, yet easy to implement and cost-effective support tool for schools, teachers and students that is destined to improve a child’s spelling ability. 

Children who are confident spellers are more likely to engage in classroom activities such as writing on the whiteboard. Furthermore, children who are good at spelling will produce fluent writing as they are not pausing to think how a word is spelt and they will grow into adulthood not relying on predictive text.

So far, we have sent out an email campaign to all schools across the UK, but unfortunately we are unable to prevent over 80% of the emails either going into the trash mailbox or bouncing back. However, the good news is that we have already signed up four schools which are currently using Super Spellers and loving the results it is producing. We have also been advertising through social media such as Facebook and Instagram.

In our ongoing mission, we are seeking to empower our future generations, children who represent the very future of our country. 

The next steps for Super Spellers. Any funds raised will be used to achieve these.

• Implement a unique spelling scheme to allow teachers to set relevant spellings for their year group by term. The scheme will be designed to set easy to more challenging words over the course of the academic year. This will reduce workload as a teacher will only need to input term dates for the scheme and spellings will be set for each child each week for the whole year.
• Develop the current Universal game to allow teachers to set competitions and battles between classes, year groups etc.
• Develop 2 new games, Galaxy Invasion which will allow students to insert spellings into a sentence format and Vortex, this game is designed to encourage students to experiment with spelling words in a multiplayer environment.
• Develop the game into an app, currently the website is only available on computers and tablets. 

This project closed unsuccessfully on 14th January 2022